Interactive Supercomputing Wins HPC Challenge Awards Competition

WALTHAM, MA--(Marketwire - November 20, 2007) - Interactive Supercomputing Inc. (ISC) has won
the annual High Performance
Computing (HPC) Challenge Benchmarks Award Competition at this year's
SC07 conference. It is the second honor bestowed upon the company at SC07,
having also won the HPCwire Editors' Choice Award for Best
Price/Performance High Performance Computing (HPC) Software.

Sponsored by The DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) Program
and the IDC analyst group, and judged by a committee led by Jack Dongarra
(University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Lab) and Jeremy Kepner (MIT
Lincoln Lab), the competition's goal is to focus the HPC community's
attention on developing HPC hardware and software capabilities that boost
the productivity of using HPC systems.

ISC won the competition's
Most Productive Commercial Implementation category for the ability of its
Star-P® software to dramatically accelerate the creation of Python
versions of the HPC Challenge benchmarks. The benchmarks -- which included
an FFT, a linear solve, a matrix multiply, and a random access problem --
were written in Python and Star-P, and run on a 128-processor at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. According
to the competition's rules, winners are judged based on the most "elegant"
implementation of four or more of the HPC Challenge benchmarks. The award
is weighted 50 percent on computational performance and 50 percent on code
elegance, clarity and size. The ISC submission required just four lines of
different source code to parallelize three of the benchmark kernels across
a 128-core cluster, with the performance of the HPL benchmark achieving 57
percent of peak. This combination of simplicity and performance is unique
in the HPC landscape.

"Winning this award underscores how user productivity has become as
important to HPC as raw processor performance," said Sudarshan Raghunathan,
member of the technical staff at ISC. "Python has recently emerged as a
powerful and flexible language for rapidly developing numerical
applications, and Star-P extends its benefits into the high performance
computing domain. We are very excited about the HPC Challenge award, as it
illustrates that Python and the Star-P programming model can deliver a
strong balance of performance and productivity for computationally
intensive applications."

Star-P is a parallel application development platform that enables users to code
algorithms and models on their desktops using familiar mathematical
software packages such as MATLAB, Python
and R and run them instantly and interactively on large scale
multi-core clusters. Star-P eliminates the need to re-program applications
in C, C++, Fortran or MPI in order to run on high performance computing
servers. Reprogramming algorithms created in VHLLs to parallel versions
without
Star-P can take months to complete for large, complex problems, so Star-P
yields dramatic improvements in parallel programming
productivity while significantly cutting the labor costs of intensive
research projects.

About Interactive Supercomputing

Interactive
Supercomputing (ISC) launched in 2004 to commercialize Star-P, an
interactive parallel computing platform. With automatic parallelization and
interactive execution of existing desktop simulation applications, Star-P
merges two previously distinct environments -- desktop computers and high
performance servers -- into one. Based in Waltham, Mass., the privately
held company markets Star-P for a range of biomedical, financial, and
government laboratory research applications.